France edges to breaking a smile – Macron leads!
France is on the edge of breaking a smile in gloomy times!
Emmanuel Macron, the audacious 39-year-old “start-up” candidate to its presidency won the first round of polling tonight but many battles lie ahead.
A Macron victory in the final round of polling on May 7 would, in his words, restore “optimism and hope” to France and Europe. He certainly is a self-confident maverick, not unlike US President Donald Trump.
His infant political movement “En Marche!” launched in April 2016 has already catapulted him to pole position for the final straight, despite having no traditional financial or political backers.
Trump’s rise was similar except that many Americans disdain him, while Macron’s supporters welcome him like an uplifting Barack Obama.
But the comparison ends there. In his anger-filled politics, Trump is more like far right Marine Le Pen who came in second with about 21.8 percent of exit polls to Macron’s 24 percent. Nearly 79 percent of voters showed up.
Opinion polls suggest that Macron will become President with 60 percent to Le Pen’s 28 percent in May because many voters will rally around him to prevent a Le Pen victory.
The French Interior ministry will detail official numbers later in the night but both Macron and Le Pen have made their first-round victory speeches and laid bare the choices facing voters.
She stands for pessimism, anger and shutting out the world, including Europe, in the name of nationalism. She wants to give France back to the French by rejecting the global village.
He stands for more cooperation with other countries to confront climate change, increase global prosperity, strengthen the European Union, deepen the fight against terrorism, and work with the United Nations.
Le Pen and Macron reconfirmed tonight that they are like night and day. France might be on the edge of breaking a smile but good cheer will take a while because its politics are mired in unprecedented fragmentation.
In the previous 2012 elections, Le Pen’s “Front Nationale” party had just two seats in the 577-seat Assemblée nationale – the lower house of French parliament, – and Macron’s “En Marche!” had none because it did not exist.
Their face-off reveals the breakdown of traditional coalitions of both right and left that have ruled France for nearly 40 years. They are hopelessly splintered because none of their candidates made it to the second round.
That has never happened. In effect, regardless of who wins neither Macron nor Le Pen have enough clout in parliament to deliver on any promise at all.
Various factions of the splintered left and right will be so busy giving black eyes to one another that either President may never manage to put together a favorable majority vote.
Both have dramatically disruptive legislative platforms. Le Pen wants to turn the clock back to a walled city state while Macron wants to decapitate entrenched bureaucracies studded with believers from right and left to build a new go-getter France that still hugs the EU.
So, each will have to pull several rabbits out of the hat at nation-wide legislative elections on June 11-18. The elections have taken on towering significance because each previous President belonged to a political coalition of the left or right, which often scored a majority or near majority to back him.
This time, Le Pen is an outlier and Macron is a novice without a parliamentary constituency.
The right lost tonight because it could not agree on a leader acceptable to all its factions. The left lost because traditional socialists could not handle a far-left insurgency that split the vote.
They have plenty of time to kick themselves for being short-sighted but each faction on both right and left continues to be ambitious and petty. They will fight tooth and nail in legislative polls to retain influence in parliament and avoid becoming permanent has-beens.
Uncharacteristically for France, nobody in any party has charisma apart from Le Pen. She is a demagogue capable of mesmerizing like-minded voters looking for a savior.
Macron is bold and decisive but he lacks the “punching from the gut” style of oratory that fires up emotions in a crowd.
His En Marche! Party will field a candidate in each of the 577 legislative constituencies hoping to win a commanding position in parliament. But he may not have the fire needed to ignite voters to turn away from their traditional political formations at the local levels.
His victory tonight was a good omen and gives cause for relief. But the battle for France will start only after he gets a grip on the Assemblée nationale.
Photo by OFFICIAL LEWEB PHOTOS – LEWEB 2014 – CONFERENCE – LEWEB TRENDS – IN CONVERSATION WITH EMMANUEL MACRON (FRENCH MINISTER FOR ECONOMY INDUSTRY AND DIGITAL AFFAIRS) – PULLMAN STAGE, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37991780